Grease Pencil Rig 2.0

so it's been a while since i've made one of these tutorials and the reason why is just because i fell down the rabbit hole that is rigging in blender and the reason why it's so difficult is really just because there's more than one way to do everything and i'm going to talk about each of those ways and why you choose each one because i have spent so long over the past few months just figure out well should i use the lattice should i make vertex groups should i just parent it as a bone we're going to talk about each one of those today and hopefully we can narrow it down because i've finally discovered how i'm gonna do it and maybe i can enlighten some of you and just make it a little bit easier so here's a rig that i've got going here and just to give you a sample i can take it and move it here i've got a separate hair control and that's front and back hair controls in case i need to you know do any wind shake or anything like that um we can rotate the head by itself i've got special jaw movements right that will just kind of enhance the lip sync i was able to go ahead and add in eyelids with eye shadow the bottom lids don't have any it just does how i did it for the other characters um what i'm most proud of probably is how the eyebrows work so um if i just grab this right here that'll control the two middle brows and i can actually go ahead and show you i can do 90 of expressions just moving this up and down from angry to sad i guess you would say and then if we come in here and just grab one of these we can move it along the zed oh whoops that's the wrong one grab one of these right here move it along the zed and now she's going what so we've got pretty much everything rigged and um i'm going to talk about this rig how it works and i'm going to leave it for download so you can check it out and i'll show you how to attach it to your rig so before we get into all that i do have some pretext i want to go over so here's my first example and this would just save you some time so you don't have to figure it out for yourself so let's say you are building an arm and you're doing it let's say you're doing it out of lines right now which is what i've done here i've just taken lines i'll move my material over to solid stroke i've just taken lines and i've set them up like that to make my arm and if you do this uh and we go ahead and parent it to our rig here i'm gonna go into pose mode uh look what's happening and what's going on here is if we go into edit mode you can see uh the vertex groups this is the fill if i i'm gonna lock that and just check out my lines here if you see what's going on here it bends it based off of the vertex groups that are here already in your object so if you're building with lines or like curved lines it's gonna simplify the geometry and when you go to bend that it's not going to bend the same way the fill does the fill actually uh provides as you saw before a lot more vertex group so if you're building with lines what you have to do is right click and we can just go to subdivide and you're just going to subdivide this as many times as you need to make a curved edge that's probably fine so these right here they're not you know you'd have to clean this up but essentially that's what's going on that's my first thing i wanted to kind of tell you and explain uh if you're having trouble and you just you know you're drawing your character with basic shapes and lines that's what's going on there so that's my first example um let's go ahead and talk about each of the types and i kind of talked about each of these in my last arm video but i'm going to go into depth and talk about what i've learned where the limitations are and what to expect so this first one is based off of uh what i actually said was the best in my last video and that's the relations tab and that's just so i could layer it in a certain way i actually have abandoned this i do not rig this way anymore and the basic reason why i don't is because when you go into let's say you want to draw and i'm going to add another layer and i want to start drawing let's just say we want to draw in a shape now you see something funky's going on i don't know where it is and that's because the origin is way over here at zero and it has to be if you remember what i had in my last video you have to apply rotation scale all transformations rotation location and scale um and when you do that you can't go back and then draw easily because you need your origin back at the same point so i can set the origin back to geometry so if we move our origin point now you can see our strokes in place but the problem is if we go back into our bone we don't get the right rotation because we had to move our origin point so this is just gonna give you a headache it's not gonna do what you want i have just given up on it and you probably should too so let's move on to the next example so what we have here is uh vertex groups so i've gone through and for each of these i've got a vertex group set up just named after the bone because you know i don't want to spend too much time it's just for example i'm actually going to use this so we've got bone dot zero zero three and bone dot zero zero four and if we go into our pose mode it works just as you expect now um i've seen some videos talking about like well why would we use lattices when there's vertex groups here and i'm gonna actually talk about that because my next one uses lattices and um this works just fine but the problem is um when you have a time offset modifier and i can talk more about this later you have to make sure you have each of the frames in that vertex group or it's not going to work that's a sort of a small get around but the main reason why i don't typically do it this way is because and i i do do it this way that's a lot the main drawback to this is when you go into let's say we grab our forearm here and we go into edit mode and let's say i want to delete part of this look what happens see the problem is when you break the vertex group it's no longer in that vertex group you've got to reassign it so if you're like me and you want to erase overlapping lines after you've attached it to the bone this is just not going to work for you because you're going to be constantly setting up those vertex groups again so let's move on to the lattice now what i do like i'm going to just go ahead and here go into the other mode and just shorten that a little bit it's just too much there's just too much depth going on there um now the appeal of the lattice is and i'll just go ahead and show you this works just like all the other ones uh the appeal of the lattices i can actually rotate this go in to my edit mode and i can delete part of this it's still attached to it because it's attached to the lattice the vertex groups exist within the lattice object that's where my bone.007 is and that's where my bone.006 lives so we can attach it through the lattice modifier well i guess if i click on the grease pencil object attach the grease pencil object to the lattice modifier the lattice to the armature now it's a bit cumbersome and if you do this to every single object it's gonna look messy and that's kind of why i don't give every single object a lattice um another benefit is we have shape keys so if i i can add my base here then i can add another one if i go in here and go into edit mode i can make custom shape keys if i want to i don't know if i necessarily would but you know it's an option and you can do that you can save it and you can go back to your basis any time and you can keyframe into those custom shape keys and you can't do that on a grease pencil object right now i hope that comes in an update later but that's why you would use a lattice basically those two reasons right there um whoops now the last way is just parenting as a bone and i did most of my bones that way and that's just how this one's set up so um i'll even go ahead and unparent these so you can see because it's super quick this is the easiest way to do it i mean period so let's go ahead and go into pose mode and uh if you choose the bones over here in the outliner you don't actually have to go back into object mode every time so i can hold shift and parent that as a bone and i'm going to do the same thing with the forearm and it's just quick it's easy now the only problem with this and i'm going to compare this to the lattice here and the armature to be honest with you so let's say i go back to my lattice one here and i'm gonna reset my pose now if you let's say you messed up and you need to go back and readjust your armature that's not going to affect the grease pencil mesh and it's because you didn't actually parent it to the armature so if i move this in object mode it actually doesn't follow and you would have to parent it as an object so i'm going to go ahead and grab this just so you can see parented as an object oh whoops just gonna grab that and parent it as an object now you can see that arm does move with it but it has a different relationship it's not parented as a bone so if i come here and i'll reset my pose you can see if i move this in edit mode because it's parented as a bone it's going to go ahead and make that change so that's something to keep in mind um the armature modifier works the same way since it's parented as a modifier and not as a bone you can also do the same thing with the lattice you can move the bones in edit mode because they share that different relationship you just have to make sure it's parented as an object so you don't just move the armature around and the grease pencil mesh doesn't follow um so that's basically everything and why you would do it that way um so let's talk about what i've got going currently for my rigs so i'm gonna go ahead and open this up here let's go to blender oh let's talk about this one first so this one's a little different because she's wearing a dress so i've extended the body this is basically just bones bendy bones and one lattice one lattice for the head and i'll talk about why the first thing i'm going to do i'm going to hide the legs because although she's in a dress there are still legs in case i need them so i'm going to go ahead and just hide those for now just for demonstration purposes scale that to zero so if there's ever anything you want to do just to hide that's how i do it it's just the quickest easiest way but i can move her around here um her hair is on a separate control so i can give it that bounce if i need to um if we zoom in here you can see that we've got uh her bangs also on separate controls if you need them um i can position her eyebrows right here i can move just the tips right here and actually i can do most of my expressions just right there um but yeah so that's basically what's going on here i also have oh let's open this one here i also have this guy he's built on the same basic concept the only difference is his arms are all one grease pencil object and he's built with bendy bones here so i guess in this video we're going to talk about not how to build this rig from scratch necessarily because i i built this rig mostly in my last video i'm going to actually just talk about how to connect this rig because i'm gonna leave it up for download and uh just go through all of the steps that i do whenever i set up a new character so let's close out of that uh let's go ahead and start with this other character i've got going here we're gonna connect her right now it's just grease pencil objects there's no time offset modifiers nothing let's go through everything and talk about what i do to set up my characters okay so let's talk about what's actually going on here so i'm gonna go ahead and hide my hands for now we'll talk about those in a minute so and i can do a video on how i set up my characters but essentially we have oh and i'm gonna have to copy her body over for this video anyway um when i did some of my characters on four i'll do my front view my quarter v on five side view on six and three quarter back and then just the back and we're gonna have to copy that over so i guess i'll go ahead and show you how to do that i guess i thought i already did that but that's all right um let's turn our overlays on i'm gonna go ahead and just unlock everything and i'm gonna move this on over so five is the same as three seven is the same as two or no i'm sorry six is the same as two and seven is the same as one now we just have to mirror everything um so yeah let's go ahead and switch this over to my line view hit a to grab everything right click we'll go ahead and mirror it and this is sort of the uh drawback to using blender because if you use let's say like open tunes then you can just mirror the entire rig no problem it looks the same on the back side as it does the front side blender doesn't necessarily work that way because you're stacking in 3d space but this doesn't take too long just go ahead and mirror it grab it along the x and then just move it into place make sure we select everything right click grab along the x just like so and of course the arms and legs they're not necessarily going to match up we're going to worry about that in a minute so now that we have all of our angles that's typically how i do it and i can do an in-depth video on how i draw and set that up but we've got all the angles that basically make a full body turn around or at least gives the illusion that it's a full body turnaround um the mouth and the eyebrows don't necessarily link up and we'll talk about how to bridge that all together probably in a different video but right now i'm going to show you how i first i set up my time offset modifiers and if i bring in the hands i'll show you there's a lot more hand shapes here going on and that's basically why i didn't want to confuse you everything gets a time offset modifier and i'm going to go ahead and add those for everything so the eyebrows so the eyebrows are gonna get one and everything's gonna be at a fixed frame and we're just gonna start oh i meant to delete all these i'm gonna add them in this video so you can see um but we'll start with our time offset and everything it's gonna get one i'll delete my driver fixed frame same thing here time offset modifier fixed frame the neck doesn't need when the next actually doesn't change time offset delete driver because we'll talk about all that in this video the body mask now i guess i could show you how i set that up but it's really just a copy of the body that i brought forward so oh you know what i just realized that so we're not going to talk about the body mask in this video i'm just going to change this to body because it just became the body uh we'll talk about that in a different video and that's just really how i hide my puppet lines but it's not necessary for with this one over my body instead of four on the time offset modifier just so everything's front facing view really just the head and the body and we go through and i actually have two different thigh shapes it's really one just with the raised lines again for puppet lines i actually don't do that until i connect it to the rig so i'm not going to talk about that right now one that's fine okay um i think the army is one too this root video is not even about time offset modifiers i don't know why i left this part in okay so we've got all of our time offset modifiers in place and that's usually where i start i guess i don't have it for the hands elite driver fixed right so we've got all of our time offset modifiers set up and that's just for everything that's going to have a change i actually might go back and add some for the forearms but i'm not going to worry about that right now um but everything's got a time offset modifier especially the face and actually i need to add one for the head you know we'll work our way up to that okay so if you downloaded the file you'll have these two files you'll have a rig template and a bendy rig template and the only difference is the bendy rig template has the arms and legs designed on one object with a tentacle style bendy rig and i'll show you how both those work and look like um so i'm gonna go ahead and what you'll do is you'll just download it put it in a folder somewhere and then you'll just go to where it's saved at here's the rig template that's the one we're gonna talk about first go to object and then armature and the first thing you'll need to do obviously fit it to your character so i'm just going to move this down a little bit to where this bone is just where her feet are i'm gonna go into edit mode and this is where i'll tailor it to my needs so i'm gonna go ahead and drag it down through the eyebrows actually i'm sorry let's start with the face here so we'll move the body bone down here everything where it needs to be this is for the mouth here mouth is this will be for our jaw so just grab that now i'm gonna move the whole face area here grab that these two or i guess these four really are for the eyelids this is eyebrows which i don't see right now i don't know why we'll figure that out in a minute here i probably don't have the time offset modifier set right yeah let's put that at four for now all right so eyebrows so we're just gonna make that fit those by grabbing all the eyebrow bones here [Music] just putting those in place and then you may need to i'm going to go ahead and put it on to my x mirroring and i'm just going to grab this one and i'm going to scale it to where it fits this brow pretty well rotate it a little bit perfect so we've got everything in the face pretty much in place with our mirroring still on we can go ahead and put all of these about where we want them to be i'm going to drag and grab both of these because they're actually disconnected and that's so my forearm and my upper arm can be uh one and behind the body and one in front of the body essentially so i can divide them up within 3d space so i've got this all set up these are my offset modifiers for my hands because we're gonna be switching hand shapes a lot i'm just gonna put them somewhere that makes sense but not in the way i'm gonna move these down a little bit and now that bone fits my character now the first thing we got to do and i'll turn off this um you'll see that this looks a little funky i'm going to go into pose mode and if uh you go in here to your constraint here you have a stretch too if you just hit x here on the original length it's gonna readjust that stretch for you and we're gonna do that with the body and the eyebrows so it just resets the stretch too nothing fancy um and now we can just go ahead and actually attach this rig so i'm going to just attach the body to this middle bone here that's the body bone ctrl p b and that's going to parent as bone and we're just gonna work our way down the list here and we're not gonna do this with the head quite yet because i've actually set that up in a little more of a complicated way and i'll talk about why as we do that but we're going to go ahead and parent all of these as a bone because it's the quickest easiest way if we need to make changes to the rig then we'll just unparent it and re-parent it it doesn't take that long um it's much better than resetting up vertex groups and worrying about all those lattices so let me just go ahead and speed through this real quick okay so now we can go ahead and check to make sure that all worked right and it looks pretty good we have our inverse kinematics that's all set up already ready to go um yeah i know it looks like everything's working right the feet the hands everything um the body so we'll grab that from here which i should probably move down but yeah the body's attached looks good okay so we've got that attached here let's go ahead and talk about what's uh so difficult about the head now i don't have any of my vertex groups set up because i'm going to talk about that with you the first thing we're going to basically do this with the armature modifier so i guess i usually start with my mouth i go into edit mode here and your mouth might be different i don't know i'm gonna make sure i've got all of my keyframes selected i'm gonna unlock my mouth and make sure everything else is locked and i'm gonna make sure i have multi-frame edit turned on now if i hit a it's going to select all of my mouth shapes and they're overlapping each other right now that's fine um i'm just going to go ahead and create a vertex group and call it mouth and then i'm going to click assign easy enough right so let's go ahead and lock that and the next thing we need to do is we're going to set up one for each of our eyelids and we do that just so you know each eyelid can be controlled by their respective bones and that'll just make animating easier yadda yadda so if you downloaded these files and you're watching this video this is exactly what you need to name these vertex groups to get it working for you so it's going to be our lid bottom for the bottom lid and then i'm just going to click assign then we're going to lock that and just move on to the next one which is our lid i've got the layers here named eyelid but i just named them lid and the bone so just don't worry about putting the eye in there so that's the bottom left lid so i'm going to go ahead and l lid bottom and then assign and then i'm in the wrong area right here this is our lid top and then l at top sign so those are all set up now though the last thing is we just said everything that's not been assigned yet to head and that could include it's going to include both the eyes left and right eye the head and head fill nose if you have it anything left over basically we're just going to assign that to head now we obviously we need to add a time offset modifier i guess i haven't done that yet so this one's for the head specifically and that's going to have a different one than our mouth because our mouth has all of the shapes we need for our lip sync and our head is really just the turnaround and they're separate so i'm gonna have this target the mouth and then if you hit this right here it'll exclude so this is the influence for which layer you want you hit this button over here and that says well this is the only layer i don't want so that is gonna allow us to set up a different time offset modifier for our mouth and then we can go ahead and set fix frame i'm going to add the drivers here in a minute and i'm going to set the influence and this one's going to target mouth and i'm not gonna hit that button i'm just gonna that's the difference here it's not targeted here it's gonna be targeted here so i've now i've got two different time offset modifiers which is cool because i can turn my head my mouse stays the same and then i've got my mouth offset modifier i guess you can't even see what's going on here and then i've got my mouth offset modifier here and that changes just the shapes of my mouth so awesome i'm gonna set that to one this one to four and we'll attach the drivers here in a second the first thing i want to do is attach the actual head so i'm going to go ahead and add my armature modifier and select my armature now if we go into our armature we should be able to rotate our head and everything [Music] now we can check to see if that parented correctly and it did so we have our head rotation that's probably a little too far up for it so i will adjust that just a little bit i guess i'll grab these all and move them down start to rotate around the chin i guess and then i'll have to go into pose mode and recalculate this stretch oh you know what i have to unparent the object so if we make any changes we're gonna have to unparent everything attached and that's the one downside with parenting is the bone so i can go ahead and make a change here now and i'm just gonna i'm just gonna move all of these down a little bit it's gonna rotate more around the chin and that'll work and then i'm gonna go back and parent these again oh you know what let's recalculate our stretch here any time we move that around recalculate your stretch just in case i think it's good let's go ahead and repair these and we'll need to just kind of go down the list again hey looking pretty good now we just need to make sure we have our hair set up and i actually set up the hair a little bit differently and we'll talk about that here in a minute but now for the head let's just talk about what i do this is an extra step if you're good with that then you're set up to go one more thing you can do though and i did include this lattice in the rig because why not under head it's already parented if you uncheck it what we can do is we can set up our lattice and if you look at this it's got two vertex groups and it's set up into jaw and head and that's just to give a little bit of squash and stretch with the lip sync when we run it through rhubarb so how i attach this is i'll go back into my modifiers i'm gonna select my head vertex group and i'm gonna check it to where it doesn't affect that to the armature because i'm gonna link that vertex group to my head lattice which is already available to you in the rig you just have to resize it to fit your needs of course but um and then on the lattice you'll want to click on the lattice and make sure it's armature is targeting this armature because it's not going to be linked to begin with so if we go into pose mode again now it's still set up like before it actually squishes if you try to do this i don't know why but because the lattice itself doesn't squish but you still got your head turned here just if you need to it side to side but the difference is now we've got this jawbone and it's already set up and ready to go because the vertex groups are already there for you so i mean it's really you're only going to want to move it along the z-axis here and it's just add a little bit of squash and stretch just to liven up those lip syncs it's gonna look a little bit you know more i mean you do the crimson chin too if you want but no it's really just a you know a little bit just to emphasize when they go e oh ah you know so you don't have to go that far with it but you know it's there if you want to do it so that's how we set that up so everything is moving in the rig the last thing you got to do is just make sure all of your time offset modifier so let's go ahead and link those to the driver the first thing uh we're going to do here is right click add driver and i did talk about this in the last video but i'm going to go ahead and go over it again because when you set up a driver there's a little bit of math involved and i think i'm going to talk a little bit more about how i kind of decide what the expression is so the first thing you want to set up here in the expression is going to be location we're going to type in location and um that's just so we can move it back and forth and you can choose see this is x location if you want to move it up and down you can do y z it you know back and forth whatever you want to do i typically just do x location leave that the same oops um and then i'm going to do plus four because this is the head right yeah so if i type that in nothing interesting has happened yet because we need to come down here it says var and we need to also just type in location that no way it knows we're going off the location um because variable is a little bit different and i don't know why it's there by default and i really don't know what it does this is about the extent of my knowledge so i'm giving it to you um i'm gonna go ahead and targeted this to the armature that's all it's gonna be called is armature and i'm gonna choose the bone and all of these bones already have a name so i'm gonna type in head head offset really simple and then just switch world space to local space and you're set up now when you go into pose mode if that's all you typed in you have to move the head bone oh this is the body i'm sorry you have to move the head offset pretty far to get it to change now enough that's fine with you then you can leave it the way it is but this is where we start adding in uh more to the expression so we can go into edit driver and actually you can just click it right here and you can change that directly right here so i'm going to add in parentheses around location and then we can times it by a certain number whoops add in the little asterisk we can times it by a certain number to make it to where you don't have to move that bone as far and you just play around with the number i've actually found that six is pretty good for the head if i go back in here i don't have to move this as far to get it to change and that's just you know so it's not going way off screen that's how you get that to kind of narrow down and then from there you can add location constraints if you want we can talk about that later maybe even in a different video i'm sure this is getting too long but if i go through i can set up all of my modifier so my hair is going to be linked back to my head because it's going to change with my head i want to make sure it does so i'm going to go ahead and copy my driver and i can just paste that directly into hair that's already set up ready to go if i go to my mouth now what we'll do is we'll just go ahead and paste it in because i want to keep the expression the exact same i'm just going to go ahead and go into edit driver and make sure that instead of head offset i'm typing mouth and there's a mouth offset bone right here ready to go named and if you download this rig it's just gonna it's gonna save you time and you can apply this to all kinds of different characters pretty quickly so our body same thing i'm just gonna paste it right in right click edit driver and instead of head offset we're going to type in body because we've got our body offset bone there and ready to go and that's as far as we need to go really i'm going to go ahead and set up my hands paste driver now with the hands there's a lot more hand shape so i'm actually going to take the six and i'm going to change it to 30 so i don't have to move that button very far and then right click edit driver and i'm going to change that to l hand and there's l hand offset and that's these bones right here so i'm going to go ahead and copy this driver into my right hand but here's the difference what i'm going to do here is i'm going to paste this in i'm going to go ahead and target it to its r hand offset but if you notice if we go in here we've got to move this bone along the right to get it to change i'm going to turn off my x-axis mirroring that's a little confusing i've got to move it this way across the body to get it to change i don't want to do that i want to move away from the body the way this does so what i'm going to do is this is actually pretty easy um we're gonna go back into our our hand here if i can find it go ahead to our our hand and what we're to do is we're going to this times 30 we're going to add a minus so it's going to be times minus 30 and that is just going to basically reverse this bone that's all you got to think of it as so now i move it away from the body and it changes the exact same way that this one does it's a mirror expression i guess so everything is pretty much set up and that really didn't take too long and this video has been long but i've been explaining a lot um see our hair here isn't attached now to attach the hair if you're doing a female character i mean we can parent it to the head bone right that would make it the quickest easiest way so if i grab my hair grab my head bone parent it as a bone and then that's really all you got to do to worry about that um we can i'll talk about more about how to get the bendy bones on the hair because you're going to want to know how to set up those bendy bones if you've got more articulate characters in it but you know like i said this is getting a little long the eyebrows aren't attached yet so let's go ahead and go to eyebrows now we gotta set these up with first of all they're gonna need a driver so let's go ahead and paste the driver in here and go ahead edit driver this is gonna be on par with the head so i'm just going to change this back to times six plus four is fine um and i'm going to target this to the head but that's set up and then with the eyebrows i also set it up with vertex groups and the only reason i do that is because they're on the same object you could split your right and your left eyebrow up on different objects and then you can come here and parent them as a bone no problem but since they're on the same object and i want them to target two different bones i've got to set up vertex groups so let's go ahead and click on the eyebrows uh the vertex groups on here already set up and i'm just gonna leave those i won't go over that because we'll talk about that in the bendy bones video on vertex groups for your upper arm and your lower arm i'm gonna go ahead and target this to the armature and now if i go in here and that's already targeting the eyebrow pretty sweet so this character's already attached i mean we've got our full body turn around we can grab these things and put them into place if we need to and we'll go over pose library and stuff in future videos but all of that set up we move the full eyebrow here going this way if we need to you know move our mouth right here it's a little cumbersome right now but we'll tie it all together with uh not only the time offset modifier but we're going to be using action constraints and we're really just going to make this rig super easy to manipulate but this is the first one that's how we get the separate forearm and lower arm if we need that more realistic bend so that's all i have for now my next video i'll show you how to set up this devil character and basically um he uses the same concept except i've got vertex groups for his upper arm and lower arm if you already know how to do that then this rig is already going to be available on that download file you can go ahead and start using it but i'll show you how to attach that one in the next video and then you can get noodly arms going there well thanks for watching

Channel: Devin Cobb

Views: 406

Keywords: grease pencil rig, blender 2d, blender, rig download, bendy bones, armature, blender tutorial, cartoon blender, how to rig cartoon character, asset reuse blender, use the same rig blender

Id: qT6G_tX4Lzo

Length: 40min 45sec (2445 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021